John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [15]
Their first bold venture was to be another Raoul Walsh Western, The Big Trail, a film of epic proportions that told of a wagon train heading west. It would be bigger than the similar silent Western epic The Covered Wagon, said Walsh. “To play the lead, the train’s scout, I wanted a young man with a certain aura that suggested the authentic American pioneer spirit. I knew that most of the established Western stars from the silent days were not only unrealistic, but they were too old. I was strolling around the Fox lot one day and as I walked by the 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 24
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property department, I saw this young feller come out—about six feet four inches in height. He walked over to a truck and picked up a big armchair and lifted it up over his head and carried it into the property department. So I went over and waited for him to come out and I asked him what he was doing.
“The young feller said, ‘I work in the property department.’
“I said, ‘Have you ever been in a picture?’
“He said, ‘No, sir.’
“I said, ‘How would you like to be in a picture?’
“The young feller said, ‘Oh, I’d like it right well.’
“I said, ‘Let your hair grow for a few weeks and come back to me.’
“So he came back a few weeks later and I got him into a buckskin and took a good silent test of him, and showed it to Winnie Sheehan, the Fox executive, and he said, ‘That’s a hell of a good-looking boy.
Can he speak?’
“I said, ‘Sure he can speak. He’s a college boy.’
“And Sheehan said, ‘All right, we’ll sign him up if you’re willing to take a chance on him.’
“I said, ‘I’m willing.’
“But they didn’t like his name—Duke Morrison—and kept changing it around and called him Joe Doakes and Sidney Carlton and all those sorts of names. I had read a book about Mad Anthony Wayne, a Revolutionary War hero, and I thought this Wayne was a great character, so I said, ‘Let’s call him Anthony Wayne, or Mad Wayne, or whatever the hell you want to call him—but call him Wayne.’ And someone suggested John Wayne. And that’s how he got his name.”
That’s the story Raoul Walsh told. Of course, this story was being told to me in 1974, forty-one years after the event, by an eighty-seven-year-old master storyteller down a transatlantic phone line, and I suspect that there was a certain amount of poetic license taken. After all, Duke Morrison had already appeared in pictures and was already known at Fox.
Michael Wayne had a different version of how his father got his screen name: “He had an agent whose name, strange though it may seem, was also Morrison. And this guy said, ‘Look, you’ve got to get rid of that Marion Morrison,’ and my father said, ‘What shall I call myself ?’ and he said, ‘John Wayne.’ ”
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Michael could only have heard this story from his father, but the problem with this account is that Wayne had not been called Marion Morrison since he was a boy. Everyone knew him as Duke Morrison.
That account also poses another question: Since Wayne was primarily a propman at Fox and only got a little work as an extra and an occasional minor role, would he have had an agent?
I’m inclined to believe the more romantic Walsh story, and I would assume that Wayne himself came up with the other version for the sole reason of not wanting to offend John Ford. As Walsh said,
“Wayne was Ford’s friend, and it’s my belief that Ford felt that if anyone was going to discover this new star, it was going to be Ford.
Instead, it was me, and Ford saw Duke’s acceptance of doing The Big Trail and taking a star role under a director other than him, as well as one who created his new name, as an act of betrayal by Duke. And Duke was punished for it when Ford refused to speak to him for some years.”
For the next five years, Wayne couldn’t understand why Ford would never take or return his calls. In later life Wayne shrugged off the notion that Ford had done any more than